EditionGuard Review – Protect Your eBooks from Piracy

In today’s world where viruses, bot nets and malware can run amok, securing work is of paramount importance. That goes without saying. In many cases, an affordable and decent anti-virus software can work but sometimes it is not enough.

For companies that publish multiple eBooks, they, like many businesses can be under attack from cybercriminals who will stop at nothing to pirate original content. In these cases, more expensive software solutions are necessary to safeguard publishers from piracy and cybercrime, but licensing costs can be prohibitive for smaller businesses.

That is where in-the-cloud solutions such as EditionGuard come in to help. In this EditionGuard Review, we´ll how they can safe-guard eBooks using Adobe Content Server .

EditionGuard helps a business and/or publishing house upload the eBooks through a web interface and store the eBooks in an encrypted data vault. According to the company, “The DRM software is the one way to ensure your eBook data will not be pirated. The encryption is done using the newest industry standard algorithms, so eBooks will be totally secured. eBook buyers will then only be able to access the eBooks which they have purchased. This is done through a simple integration with our API’s in your e-commerce application and is platform independent.”

While EditionGuard is only eight months old, already a number of bookstore chains, self publishers, e-commerce sites, government institutions that wish to sell through a specific portal and publishing houses have flocked to EditionGuard to “guard” their eBooks

You can access EditionGuard by any device that connects to the internet from laptops to eBook readers as well as tablets and smart phones.

What Does it Look Like?

EditionGuard is relatively easy to navigate but not so easy to get started if you are unfamiliar with programming languages. There are some areas where you will need some basic programming knowledge and the team at EditionGuard can help you if necessary (or you may want to find someone to help you – hire an IT consultant for a day if you do not have such a person on staff).

Once you’re logged in, you will click on the “My eBooks” link at the top of the page and this link will take you to the eBook management interface, where you’ll be adding, updating and deleting your eBooks. There will be grid listing your eBooks uploaded to the service. From there – you can go to the “add books” column to upload your e-Books.

One thing you should know is that any eBook file must be in PDF or ePub in order to upload an eBook into EditionGuard. That said,once you upload your books, you can see via your dashboard which eBooks you have uploaded (and those are the books that your customers, employees, etc. will have permission to download).

The easy part of using EditionGuard is uploading your eBook. But then, if you are not a programmer, comes the harder part — and that is dealing with the Resource ID” column. According to EditionGuard, “This column shows you the unique identifier that points to your eBook within the Edition Guard system. You will be using this identifier to specify which eBook you wish to be downloaded.” This is where you will have have to have some knowledge of C# and PHP languages to do that. I will not go through the whole process as that can be found on the Help tab of the EditionGuard website – but suffice it to say using EditionGuard to connect your API as well as well as specifying eBooks for download, does take some programming knowledge.

In addition to being able to store and then load your e-Books safely onto your website for sale or download — EditionGuard also provides some reporting tools to showcase how many books have been bought by your customers for instance.

Integrating EditionGuard

If you are not a developer, an easier way to run EditionGuard is to use their native Magento plugin and WordPress extension, as well as our Shopify App coming in March. These allow users to setup and integrate their websites without any programming knowledge.

Will it Fit Your Budget

The good news is that EditionGuard uses the expensive Adobe DRM software so you don’t have to — so your costs per month are fairly reasonable. While you may need some help from your IT manager to start up (and if you don’t have one, you might consider hiring a consultant for a day or two) the lowest cost per month, is $39. This allows you to to have up to five titles and you will be charged .45 cents each time a customer downloads your eBook. The good news is that if the customer downloads to both their PC and their iPad – you only get charged once. Subscription costs go up to $79 per month for 25 titles and $149 for 200 titles. The highest price is $249 per month for unlimited titles. At each subscription level, you will get a certain amount of storage space and you will be charged for each customer download of your book (the customer download charges decrease with each increasing subscription level).

Is it for You?

Any company that sells eBooks as part of their business model will want to look into EditionGuard. Piracy is not just about software, music and movies these days…eBooks are part of the game as well. While no security measure is ever a hundred-percent, EditionGuard, even with its affordable costs, can probably provide you some peace of mind knowing your eBooks are safe.

Ratings: ease of use 4/5, features 5/5, value 5/5 and ease of deployment 4/5